In the Closet at CNN

In “Hot-Lanta” You Stay “In The Closet” As CNN’s Don Lemon Did

”. In writing his book, Lemon said “the decision to come out happened organically.”

One of the motivating reasons for Lemon, 45, now revealing his sexual orientation is because of the suicide of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi. Clementi, if your remember, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after finding out that his college roommate and another classmate used a webcam to secretly broadcast his sexual encounters with another male, highlighting the dangers of “cyberbullying” – teasing, harassing, or intimidating with pictures or words distributed online or via text message. Clementi’s suicide, along with the other eight lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth and young adults, went viral in September 2010 and they saturated the media.

In this era of acceptance to LGBTQ people in news broadcasting like Lemon’s colleague, Anderson Cooper ABC’s Good Morning America weather anchor Sam Champion, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and her colleague Thomas Roberts, to name a few, one would wonder what is the media brouhaha with Lemon’s disclosure, especially since his sexual orientation wasn’t a secret at work.

“It’s quite different for an African-American male,” Lemon told Joy Behar on her HLN show. “It’s about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away.”

And Lemon is right. With homophobia running as rampant in historically black colleges and universities as it is in black communities, there are no safe places for GBTQ brothers of African descent to safely acknowledge their sexuality as well as to openly engage the subject of black GBTQ sexualities.

“I was born gay, just as I was born black,” Lemon to Behar.

But black GBTQ sexualities within African American culture are perceived to further threaten not only black male heterosexuality, but also the ontology of blackness itself.

And with certain aspects of Hip-hop culture displaying a hyper-masculinity, this male-dominated genre is aesthetically built on the most misogynistic and homophobic strains of Black Nationalism and afrocentricism.

Lemon courageously goes on to explain to Behar another reason why it took him so long to come out.

“And our community is steeped in religion, with the church preaching against homosexuality. I prayed a lot growing up that I would change, that I would be straight,” he said. “But no matter how good I was, how much I prayed and denied what I was, it [being gay] was always there.”

According to the PEW Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, 87 percent of African Americans identify with a religious group and 79 percent say that religion is very important in their lives. The Pew report also showed that since 2008, African-American Protestants are less likely than other Protestant groups to believe that LGBTQ people should have equal rights. And since hot-button issues like gay adoption and marriage equality have become more prominent, support for LGBTQ rights among African-American Protestants has dipped as low as 40 percent.

A groundbreaking study in July 2010 came out titled, “Black Lesbians Matter” examining the unique experiences, perspectives, and priorities of the Black Lesbian Bisexual and Trans community. One of the key findings of the survey revealed that there is a pattern of higher suicide rates among black LBTs. Scholars have primarily associated these higher suicide rates with one’s inability to deal with “coming out” and the Black Church’s stance on homosexuality.

As the “No Hope Baptist Church of God and Christ” and the “Apostolic Church of Hell” stand front and center in our black communities, espousing religion-based bigotry as the word of God, these places of worship are the reasons why Lemon, and we as an African American community can’t tell the truth about our sexuality, and have the price we pay in telling the truth.

And because African Americans don’t address the homophobic role the Black church plays in creating a “down-low (DL)” culture, not only among its worshippers but also among its “down low” ministers who espouse damning messages about homosexuality, ministers such as Bishop Eddie Long and Pastor Donnie McClurkin can tell their truths.

Pastor Donnie McClurkin, the poster boy for African American ex-gay ministries, “testi-lies” that his homosexuality is from being raped; thus, confusing same-gender sexual violence with homosexuality.

Bishop Eddie long, one of the Black Church’s prominent pastors of “prosperity gospel” and “bling-bling” theology “testi-lies” that the pubescent boys he nurtured were “spiritual sons” rather than what many of us perceived as one of his many lies stashed in his stained-glass closet.

Lemon resides in Atlanta, and it’s not the old Atlanta of MLK days. It’s the new black Mecca and the new “Black Hollywood” that it’s fondly called “Hot-lanta.” And African-American stars flock to this entertainment Mecca-in-training as do black urban professionals (Buppies).

But if you’re LGBTQ in “Hot-lanta” you stay in the closet, as Lemon once did.

About Rev. Irene Monroe

Rev. Irene Monroe is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School. One of Monroe’s outreach ministries is the several religion columns she writes - “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper that circulates widely throughout New England, “Faith Matters” for The Advocate Magazine, a national gay & lesbian magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. Her writings have also appeared in Boston Herald and in the Boston Globe. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim.

Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American , queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.”

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